A delicacy now, snails in the human diet may have meant survival 150,000 years ago

Archaeologists digging in Libya have found evidence of human habitation going back at least 150,000 years and have had a glimpse into the people’s diet: snails whose shells were pierced to get at the meat.

The site, at Haua Fteah Cave on the Mediterranean coast, has been under investigation since 1948. Recently, archaeologists with three British universities have examined tens of thousands of snail shells that show evidence of being worked by humans. The researchers have done scientific dating on the shells to determine how old they are. The institutions involved are the University of Cambridge, Queen’s University Belfast and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Cambridge.